Soul on Fire
by Born-Of-Elven-Blood
Summary: "I have no name. This blood has no source, no line. I have no ancestors to watch over me. I am the son of no one..." - From broken-hearted to darkly determined, what went through Loki's mind between the moment he discovered his true heritage, and the moment we first saw him seated on the throne of Asgaard?


**Disclaimer**: Thor characters and story belong to Marvel; this fanfic is my creation; please do not re-post elsewhere without permission.

**AN**: I've always wondered what was going through Loki's head between that moment in the weapon's vault when he learned the the truth about his parentage, and the moment we see him as king on the throne of Asgaard. This is an attempt to answer that.

This story was inspired by the fanart entitled "Rue" by Linda Marie Anson:  
lindamarieanson . deviantart art / Rue-339197355

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**Soul on Fire**

* * *

_This is me for forever, one of the lost ones  
The one without a name,  
Without an honest heart as compass…_

_All I wish is to dream again  
My loving heart lost in the dark  
For hope I'd give my everything;_

_Once and for all and all for once  
'Nemo' my name forevermore._

_[Nightwish, "Nemo"]_

* * *

Loki ran. His rapid footfalls and harsh breath echoed in the cavernous golden corridors, giving the illusion that he was pursued, chased, hounded through the halls of what he'd always believed was his home.

He ran as though his feet could outrun the truth.

_Laufey's son…_

His eyes squeezed shut against the thought. His shoulder clipped a column at full speed. Pain exploded. He barely felt it. He ran faster.

Father… _Odin_… slept. No one knew for how long. This Odinsleep was different.

_Not my fault!_

His mind screamed it, but his heart didn't believe it. The memory of his own enraged voice echoing in his ears, as it spat its acid down on his father's… on _Odin's _still form…

He had stood in attendance at the king's bedside long enough for appearances, but the world seemed made of shattered glass, all webbed with fractures and ready to rain down around him at the least touch. At the first opportunity, he'd excused himself with grave calm in the face of emergency; completely proper, showing only strength, sobriety, solemnity, never fear, never sorrow, never any weaker sentiment. As a prince of Asgaard should do.

_As a prince of Asgaard should do…_

Memories assaulted him.

His mother was holding him as a boy, her arms soft and warm around his middle where he sat on her lap, her clear voice singing to him, safety and love, teaching him little tricks when he'd proven to have a gift for magic even as a small child…

She knew even then, held him close, said she loved him.

Called him her son.

What was lies, and what was truth? Was any of it true?

_I found a baby. Small, for a giant's offspring. Abandoned. Suffering. Left to die._

He couldn't seem to get enough air into his burning lungs.

In his mind he saw Thor: bright, shining Thor, the radiant hero of the Aesir, the beloved natural child of Odin and Frigga. What wonder that Loki, born a subhuman savage, could never live up to his example? It was like racing a cart pony against an eight-legged stallion. Memories of the pair of them riding through the meadows, sparring in the training halls, bickering and fighting, playing and laughing, conspiring in misadventures and mischief…

The gilded aura of a thousand beloved memories sloughed away under the pall of his new reality…

Clear as a clarion, he heard the echo of Thor's voice brimming with youthful glee, vowing to hunt down and slaughter every last Frost Giant. Little did he know there was one standing right next to him…

Odin had heard him say it that day. Odin, who had never seemed to tire in those days of recounting his victory over the Frost Giants, that vicious race of monsters; how brutal and ruthless they were, how he brought them low and made them bow before the might of Asgaard.

It was no different than what everyone else said, of course – the stories they told of Frost Giants vividly painted the cruel, primitive brutes massacring the honorable, slaughtering women, flaying and eating children raw. Everyone in Asgaard spoke so of the Frost Giants. Everyone despised them…

But Odin _knew _what he was all the while! That day, standing there in the weapons vault, watching Thor and him bicker over who was more ready to decimate Jotunheim, was he getting some sick satisfaction from displaying his trophy to the unwitting offspring of his conquered enemy?

_ Laufey's son._

He stumbled, catching himself against one of a pillar, then throwing himself back into the concealing shadows behind it as he heard the quite staccato of footfalls nearby. It was only the guards making their rounds. Yet here he hid in his own home, like an intruder. And was he not? _Sound the alarm, _he thought hysterically. _The enemy is inside the walls._

He clung there, his back to the pillar, sucking air greedily into his burning lungs as new memories bubbled in like froth from an epileptic rictus to crowd out the old.

Not even a full day ago, he had stood before the throne of the Jotun king. It felt like an age had passed since the Frost Giant soldier had wrapped its craggy fingers around his forearm and it had not burned, but tingled and turned his skin the hideous mottled blue of a Jotun hide. Less than a day had passed since he had looked up into those merciless, blood-red eyes. Less than a day since he had heard that voice, like the grinding of broken rocks, and spoken himself, so courteously, to that gruesome, bloodless monstrosity that was his… his…

_Laufey's son._

_ NO! _

Every part of his being rejected it.

His stomach twisted; something desperate and panicked trying to claw its way out of his chest. His throat closed reflexively, as though his body knew instinctively that if he let that raging, burning something fly free, it would tear him to shreds and leave nothing but a bleeding husk in its wake. His subconscious strove to save him, even though he now knew that was the very thing he had been raised all his life to fear, despise and destroy.

_Hush, baby mine, _his mother's voice echoed in his head, comforting him when as a child he'd had a nightmare that Frost Giants had come to eat him. _You are safe in your bed, and no monster can reach you here. _

_Liar! _ The monster was in the bed with him all along. The monster had always been there, inside him. How could she? It was hard enough to be Odin's great disappointment, little more than a spare next to Thor's great glory, the second prince in every sense, a back-up plan everyone hoped they would never have to turn to – though now he knew he was not even that. But he had always believed that even if Odin could not care for him, he was still Odin's son. Still Frigga's son, and that Frigga always would…

No wonder she had lied to him. How often must she have lied to herself to go on treating him like he mattered, the hideous, frozen beast spawned by her greatest enemy…

_NO! _His mind repeated, and even in his head, he sounded deranged, unrecognizable. The snarl of a hideous beast out of every child's nightmares. _No! No! I am not the son of that creature. I am not Laufeyson! I am not! I am NOT!_

But neither was he the son of Odin.

Who was he? Who?

_No one, _his heart hissed through the slivered cracks in his reality that seemed to have poisoned his senses – his fingers felt numb, and he realized he had clenched his fists so tightly that they his muscles had locked up; his nails bit into his palms and blood oozed lazily from between his fingers._ I have no name. This blood has no source, no line. I have no ancestors to watch over me. I am the son of no one._

A strangled sound escaped from low in his throat. The walls and columns seemed to loom around him, close and cloying, and the shadows seemed to lengthen and deepen ready to swallow him whole. Little knowing or caring now if the guards saw him fleeing like a frightened child, he abandoned his refuge behind the column.

He ran again, blind to the blur of the castle corridors racing past him. He imagined he could feel little shards of his heart falling to litter the floor behind him, leaving a fragile trail of agony and loss glittering in his wake, little fractals of himself abandoned so that the rest of him could be delivered. But try as he might, he could not escape. He could neither run nor fight this foe. The monsters were all inside him.

* * *

_I'm so lost, I am damned  
In this gray lonely valley;  
Starless nights so vast and so black  
My prayers slowly sink to a whisper;  
I'm falling into the deep  
I'm falling  
Drowning in destiny…_

_[Leaves' Eyes, "My Destiny"]_

* * *

His legs carried him faster than Sleipnir out into the night. He slammed through a side door and bolted out into the shining dark light of Asgaard's night. A flight of stone stairs stood in his way, and in his haste, his boot caught on the last step. With a quiet gasp, he lost his balance. He turned so that he hit the ground shoulder first and rolled, as his centuries of combat training had ingrained in him. Cool grass and soft earth caught him. He tumbled over onto his back with a grunt and lay still, panting.

The air was warm and sweet with flowers. Somehow he'd found his way into the secluded garden his mother kept for their family's private use. _My mother… my family…_

He stared, eyes wide and unblinking, up at the endless starscape stretching overhead. Grief and adrenaline made his head spin and from where he lay, he wildly imagined that the golden fluted spires of the palace were fingers of a meandering shoreline, the universe beyond an endless glittering ocean in which countless wonders, adventures, treasures, and monsters awaited him. It was an old fantasy, something he'd dreamed up as a boy, laying in this very garden.

Now the shining night blurred, the stars liquefying and running together, as tears welled in his eyes. He blinked once, sending two crystalline drops rolling back into his hair to tickle his ears, and as his vision cleared, for an instant he saw the strange vantage point differently: instead of a shoreline, he saw the Bifrost bridge stretching out over the edge of the world, and beyond he saw not the shining lights, but the dark places between the stars, so black and void that he could hide forever in their inky depths and never have to face the light, and all its hideous truth ever again. His breath came in faster and faster as he pictured it, and for a panicked instant he was sure he could feel himself falling, falling up, rushing past the gilded pinnacles, rocketing like a stone down a well into the vast, dark oblivion beyond the stars…

With a gasp, he rolled over, squeezing his eyes shut. Little green sparks flashed in the air around him, magic stirring in the air with his emotion. He curled onto his side and covered his face with both hands, shivering. He was cold all over.

_Cold… how can I be cold? I'm… I'm a…_

Sitting up, he lifted his hands away from his face, staring down at them numbly. Little red half-moons all in a row dotted each palm, still oozing blood, though they were already closing. He could not stop himself remembering the sight of them, these hands he'd known for over a thousand years, suddenly hideously blue, hard, lined with unyielding ridges. Not hands at all; the claws of a monster. A bogeyman. A nightmare given flesh.

A snowflake landed on his palm.

He blinked, his brow furrowing in surprise. More alighted on the tips of his fingers, on his sleeves, and the ground beyond. He slowly lifted his eyes, looking around the lush green garden, stalks heavy with bright, sweet-scented blossoms, to find that, for the first time in living memory, it was snowing in Asgaard.

No, not in Asgaard – in the garden. A tinge of magic was in the air… his own, leaking from the edges of his mind and the cracks in his heart. Already the plants were beginning to wilt and wither before his eyes under the unaccustomed cold and damp.

_My true state. A killing frost. Ice and death. A horror fit only for ruin and slaughter._

His eyes dropped away from the perishing garden. Something vital inside him began to wilt and die like the green, growing things all around him, as he stared at his hands with the inescapable knowing of what was hidden beneath whatever magic masked his true appearance…

The snowflakes tumbled onto his hands.

And melted there.

For a surreal moment, his mind balanced on a blade's edge, uncomprehending as it tried to pitch over the edge of some epiphany. He swallowed and blinked more tears out of his eyes, willing his mind to work past the numbing grief.

The snow that touched his skin was melting.

_How? _He wondered, his mind latching onto this niggling question in a quest for denial. _I'm a… a Frost Giant. My hands should create ice, not melt it…_

Sitting up straighter, he wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand, sniffing slightly, then held out his and again, watching the snowflakes melt in his palm. The raging tempest of bitterness and horror that had torn at him since Odin's words had set him adrift began to calm around the edges now, each dissolving fleck of frozen night washing away at it until he could see through it to the flickering light at the edge of his horizon. Flickering in the core of his chest like a flame driving back a blizzard's chill, insubstantial, but undeniable.

His eyes fluttered up to take in the frozen garden, and his gaze lit on a small patch of rue. They were a favorite of his mother… _Frigga…_ no _his mother!_ The little yellow blossoms in their bed of heavy green leaves were shriveling in the ice. Scrambling to his feet, sliding unsteadily on the slick ice that coated the walkway, he crossed to the flowerbed and knelt beside the languishing blooms.

Slowly, almost afraid, he reached down and cupped one of the little flowers in his hands. The frozen stem snapped like a straw of sugar candy, but Loki hardly noticed as he lifted the little golden gem of a flower between his palms. Breathing deep, he summoning up his sorrow and longing, and that flickering flame of hope, he poured them into the little plant. Magic swirled in the freezing night, dancing dreams between the snowflakes, as the little flower grew radiant with the light of his power. He watched, intent, his heart aching, as the rue blossom brightened, defiantly throwing off its killing coat of ice, its leaves firming, its petals growing supple and bright once more.

Filled with his magic and will, bloomed more beautiful than before, straining towards him as though it felt the same longing for light and warmth as he.

And the same hope.

He was a Frost Giant. There was no denying the words from Odin's lips, much less the proof of his own eyes.

_But I am not only that. I cannot be only that… _

He was raised the son of an Aesir. The son of a king. He had lived a thousand years in the shining shadow of the Realm Eternal, eaten the golden apples of Idunn, honed his magic and his skills beyond the greatest magic masters of the realm.

The storm inside him had condensed, become smaller, less destructive, but harder, more furious at its core – controlled, but more potent; and ready to be unleashed, tenfold stronger, at whatever threatened the tenuous, flickering flame of hope, more fragile than the glowing bloom, at the core of his soul. Darkness called from the edges of night, a siren song mysterious and threatening from between the stars, still pulling at the bleeding wound that the truth had carved into him, needling him towards the edge of sanity. But oh, for this hope… for this hope he would endure.

Dark thoughts leaked from the heart of the crystallized storm within, twisting strands that began to stretch into a web of possibilities constructed to shield the flicker of hope from harm, stretching into the immediate future and beyond: machinations, half-truths, manipulations… Loki was a master of blades and magic, but his weapon of choice had always been words, tricks, lies.

He was no monster. That was just an accident of birth. An accident he had spent the past thousand years amending, a lie he'd worked tirelessly to disprove all his life, without ever knowing he was doing it. He _was _worthy to be called the son of Odin. Just as worthy as Thor… just as worthy…

A shadow passed over his face, and his eyes grew cold and hard for an instant. But the glow of the rue caught his gaze, and melted his expression. He held it closer, huddling around the warmth and life of it where he knelt surrounded by a world of ice and death.

"I am Loki, of Asgaard," he told the rue blossom, his voice shockingly calm and loud in the sound killing blanket of snow. Piercing the night with fierce promises. "I am the son of Odin. And somehow, I will prove it."

* * *

_We are like the living dead  
Craving for the deliverance  
With a frozen heart,  
And a soul on fire._

_[HIM, "Soul on Fire]  
_

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**END**

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Songs I listened to while writing:

Nemo by Nightwish  
My Destiny by Leaves Eyes  
Soul on Fire by HIM

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You know what to do! Please review!


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